Alan Caruba's blog is a daily look at events, personalities, and issues from an independent point of view. Copyright, Alan Caruba, 2015. With attribution, posts may be shared. A permission request is welcome. Email acaruba@aol.com.

Thursday, May 8, 2014

Downsizing Australia's Government and Repealing Green Laws

By Alan
Caruba

Try to
imagine a commission of the U.S. government recommending that it get rid of the
Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, countless
agencies, and, for good measure, restructure Medicare so it doesn’t go broke.
There are few Americans who will argue that our federal government isn’t big
enough and many who trace our present problems to Big Government.

That is
why what has been occurring in Australia caught my attention because its voters
rid themselves of a political party that imposed both a carbon tax and
renewable energy tax on them. The purpose of the latter was to fund the
building of wind turbines and solar farms to provide electricity.

Taxing
carbon emissions—greenhouse gases—said to be heating the Earth has happily died
in the U.S. Senate, but in Australia the taxes were a major reason that the
Liberal Party (which is actually politically conservative despite its name)
took power after a former Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, pushed it and the
renewable energy tax through its parliament.

Gillard
became the first woman PM after she challenged then PM Kevin Rudd to lead the
Labor Party (which is politically liberal.) Like John Kerry, Gillard was
against the taxes before she was for them. How liberal is Rudd? In February he
was named a senior fellow of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Like Obama, Rudd came out in favor of same-sex marriage when he was the PM.

Bjorn
Lomborg, writing in The Australian in
late April, noted that both of the taxes “have contributed to household
electricity costs rising 110 percent in the past five years, hitting the poor
the hardest.” I repeat—110 percent!

It didn’t
take Australians long to discover what a disaster taxing carbon emissions was
and how useless renewable energy is. In both cases the taxes were based on the
notion that “fossil fuels”, coal, oil and natural gas, are a threat to the
environment. Despite an increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere, the Earth has been cooling for the last seventeen years. Mother
Nature always has the last word.

As of this
writing, the repeal of the two Green laws is in the Parliament’s Senate after
having won assent in the lower House. A September 2013 election
provided enough new Senate lawmakers to ensure the repeal.

The
Commonwealth of Australia is the sixth largest nation by total area. It was
claimed by Great Britain in 1770 and New South Wales was used as a penal colony
initially. As the general population grew and the continent was explored, five
more self-governing crown colonies were established. On January 1, 1901, the
six colonies and several territories federated to form the Commonwealth. The
population is approximately 23 million is highly urbanized and lives primarily
in the eastern states.

Australia
is the world’s 12th largest economy making it one of the wealthiest
in the world, but the environmentally-inspired taxes had a deleterious impact
on its economy, particularly the mining of coal and iron. As noted, the cost of
electricity skyrocketed.

The present
Prime Minister is Anthony John “Tony” Abbott. He has held the office since 2013
and has been the leader of the Liberal Party since 2009. A Member of
Parliament, he was first elected in 1994 as the representative of Warringah. He
made a lot of news when he protested a proposed Emissions Trade Scheme and
forced a leadership ballot that defeated it, becoming in the process the
Liberal Party leader and leader of the opposition to Rudd and Gillard’s Labor
Party.

As
reported in the April 30 edition of the Sydney Morning Herald, Abbott’s Commission of Audit “has recommended massive cuts
to the size of government, with whole agencies to be abolished, privatized, or
devolved to the states, in what would be the biggest reworking of the
federation ever undertaken.”

The
Commission, the Herald reported, has
86 recommendations, among which are “calls for the axing of multiple agencies
and the surrender of huge swathes of responsibility back to the states in
education, health, and other services.”

The Australian reported that Joseph Benedict
“Joe” Hockey, Australia’s Treasurer as part of the Abbott government, said that
the proposed budget would axe “the vast number of (environmental) agencies that
are involved in doing the same thing.” Hockey is no fan of wind power, saying
“If I can be a little indulgent, I drive to Canberra to go to parliament and I
must say I find those wind turbines around Lake George to be utterly offensive.
I think they are a blight on the landscape.” That kind of candid talk, if he
was an American politician, would be considered astonishing.

The best
“transformation” America could undergo is not President Obama’s version, but a
return to the limits set forth in the U.S. Constitution, a document that reflected
the Founder’s distinct distrust of a large central government and its
allocation of civic responsibilities to the individual states to the greatest
degree possible, and to "the people."

Australia
is way ahead of the U.S. in that regard, learning from the errors of
environment laws and the expansion of its government into areas of health and
education. We would do well to follow its example.

About Me

I am and have been for a long time a writer by profession. I have several books to my credit and my daily column, "Warning Signs", is disseminated on many Internet news and opinion websites, as well as blogs. In addition, I am a longtime book reviewer and have a blog offering a monthly report on new fiction and non-fiction.